There surely aren't many gigs where people ask at the door if they can bring a dog in with them. Crufts, maybe? Those doggy-based films where they probably won't let you in without a pooch? But not usually a comedy night down at The Stand. Ultimately that request for canine privileges was denied, but this is just the kind of offbeat thing that happens at a Luisa Omielan show. Like Tim Key tenderly massaging his playing cards or Mark Watson tapping away at a laptop, Omielan is already on stage as the audience files in. She's dancing like nobody's watching, knowing full well that everyone will be.

Grief (more on that soon) led her to allowing a Bernese Mountain Dog called Bernie into her life and she goes pretty much nowhere without her. From the back of the room, you can see the occasional tip of a shiny, happy tail and this is one very well-behaved Bernese Mountain Dog; not a single howling heckle for the 75-minute duration. People assume Bernie is a boy which gets right on Omielan's goat and feels like just another symptom of the patriarchy which she chucks pelters at throughout most of God Is A Woman.

A show structurally split into two distinct halves, the opening portion tackles the title more or less head-on with a diatribe about and against religion. She apologises for this upfront but it's likely to offend only the most easily offendable. To be ungracious, it feels like a first or second draft, her motormouth delivery spilling through the ideas and concepts and characters she's picked up along the way during her research into this area. There's more than a room-filling aroma of Eddie Izzard's ecclesiastical surrealism here as she muses on Jesus hanging out with a guy called Barry, both harbouring admiration for American Idol's 2005 winner Carrie Underwood. Mary Magdalene features heavily here, too, with Omielan giving her a silly voice. There is probably a good 15 minutes embedded within the 40 about faith.

The second segment is far more satisfying, more deeply personal material which ultimately loops in with her overriding theme that, to simplify it crudely, revolves around societies (western and otherwise) not exactly respecting women. Thrown into a grief-stricken paralysis by her mum's swift death after a cancer diagnosis, Omielan penned moving material that was first aired in 2018's Politics For Bitches and which understandably may inform her act for some time to come.

From there we hear about her life as a single woman living first in cash-draining London before moving out to the more affordable Birmingham where domestic calamity strikes. But through these woes, she strikes up a friendship with a Pakistani handyman (yes, she does the accent, but yes she puts forward a credible argument why that is perfectly OK) and there's a neat (maybe too neat) call-back to the Messiah and Mary Magdalene. Bernie might not have raised a peep through the whole set but as the clock runs out, her owner finally pauses for breath. It's impossible not to admire Luisa Omielan's energy and enthusiasm, but it's simultaneously also feasible to wish that she'd take a step back from her material and apply the editing scissors to several chunks of it.

Luisa Omielan: God Is A Woman tours until Monday 20 December; review from The Stand, Edinburgh, Monday 11 October.